Bus Forty-Three
An AI designer discovers a mysterious bus
“And as for transportation, we have access to three campus buses: the forty-one, the forty-two, and, of course, the forty-four,” said the leader of the college tour. “If you see the forty-three, don’t take it! Don’t get on! We don’t know where it goes!”
Ha ha ha, went the parents.
Ha ha ha, went their children.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha.
I saw it. Three and a half years later, in the ice desert of a Wisconsin winter, the sky a cloudy, starless black, fingers and toes freezing, all the layers in the world unable to keep out that crushing cold, I saw it.
A beat-up and battered bus stop at midnight because homework, studying, internship application, work-work, exams, etc. I’d never been there before, never even noticed it, the place about a block from the library, tucked away where an alley met a desolate street, hidden from sight, glass half broken, little more than a metal frame to glisten in the dark.
The bus emerged out of shadow—big, boxy, old, outdated, obsolete, coated in rust, paint chipping around every corner, wheels struggling beneath its weight—and instantly I felt it, felt the shivers along my spine, felt a dull drumming in my head, felt myself drowning in a dunk tank, felt sick unto death, felt a nausea clasp me and hold me in poison hands, felt my eyes flutter and my vision blur, felt myself sinking deep into the earth to some secret place where no one would ever find me again.
There was a number by the door. I read the number. Forty-three, painted in black, bold letters, the only part of the vehicle untouched by time.
I struggled to even stand, feet seeming so far beneath me in the snow.
The door opened. The world twisted.
Sick beyond sickness, beyond seasick, carsick, motionsick, homesick. This is the way the world ends, with sick, sick sick sick.
And then came the thing that haunted me, that stayed with me long after I’d convinced myself it was a dream or hallucination or some stress-induced psychosis (“Of course there wasn’t a bus. There is no bus forty-three.”), the thing that waited for me every night as I closed my eyes in bed, the thing that still waits for me, now; someone—some invisible conductor just out of sight, some bland, mundane, unrecognizable voice—spoke to me,
“Destination:”
And in yellow, glowing font on a little screen within, that same word: Destination:
But there was no destination; it was blank.
I don’t know how I ran. I still don’t. Somehow, through the cold and the cloud of nausea, through the black alley lit only by dim streetlights, I pulled myself from the gaping maw of the bus’ door, from the trance of that absence, and bolted through the dark, not stopping until I was vomiting out my insides in the library sink, until I was washing my face in hot water, until I was curling up on a couch and falling asleep.
I passed my exams. I got the internship. It all grew smaller in my mind, less important, all fading but that single word, that word from the voice, from the screen.
Destination:
“What are you majoring in?” I asked.
“History,” she said. “What about you?”
“Programming,” I said.
“Isn’t that job being taken by AI?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
Silence.
“What kind of stuff do you do for fun?” she asked.
“I play video games. Some basketball too,” I said. “What about you?”
“I read a lot,” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
Silence.
“How’s Edgewood?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said. “How’s UW-Madison?”
“Okay,” I said.
Silence.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“California,” I said. “What about you?”
“Nebraska,” she said.
“Was it nice there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We moved pretty soon after my mother passed.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Silence.
“Maybe I’ll see you around,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
Silence.
I left the date—the one with Anna’s friend who she “thought I would really like”—feeling the same as when it had begun, which was to say, pretty neutral. It had not been pleasant or unpleasant or anything really. I would not text her. She would not text me. We would not see each other again. It was fine.
Nearly six months had passed since the bus incident—only a little speck in my mind, a half remembered scene from an old movie, nothing more—and now the winter was gone and the beauty of Madison shown through, flowers blooming, lakes glistening, and often I would choose to walk home from tech firm where I interned rather than drive, just to see the streets and the sights and the scenery.
It was a lovely city, coffee shops and bakeries and ice cream parlors never far, a little bit of campus everywhere one looked, and the constant possibility of a trip to the lake if the heat ever grew too much.
Still, sometimes I felt strange wandering there, out of place, like I did not belong in that elegant city, like I was more suited to burning Cali or the dark basements of the firm, like I would always be something of an outsider, an intruder, unwelcome, unneeded, unwanted.
But after a day of lectures or a long night coding with Anna, such feelings would soon pass, and then I would be fine.
There were two doors that greeted us when we entered Dyson Tech, one blue and one red. Anna and I always went through the blue door, beyond which lay the servers and cubicles and endless computers, circuit boards covering over all. We did not know what lay beyond the red door; it became a running joke.
“Hey, have you seen my laptop?” “It’s probably past the red door.”
“Did you take my coffee?” “No, it probably just past the red door.”
“Can I have my salad back?” “If you can get it from past the red door.”
Once, one of Anna’s friends had visited us there, and when she had jokingly asked: “Where do you guys bury the bodies?” Anna instantly replied, “Past the red door,” and we couldn’t help laughing at the look of concern on her friend’s face.
I think it was only her, only Anna, who kept me sane in those days, in that dark basement where the screens burned our eyes as we worked at the pointless, tedious task to which we’d both been assigned, being the only two summer interns. We were training an LLM—a large language model, one of the worst advents of modern technology, essentially a random word generator which some marketing bigwig had managed to sell to the world as “Artificial Intelligence,” as if there was anything intelligent about it. Usually, coding came as a comfort to me—a temporary freedom from the insanity of living, a world of numbers and letters and commands in which everything made sense, in which one could craft gears and levers and pulleys from words and string together incredible, beautiful, sublime contraptions—but not this, not finding websites with weak defenses for this ugly, overgrown mass of wires to scrape data from until it could stick together a sentence that barely made sense.
I cannot stress the relief that fell over me when, on my first day there, after nearly three hours of silently feeding this monstrous jerryrig of false sentience, down in the dark and heat that nearly had me sweating, Anna finally said,
“You hate this too, right?”
And in that moment—despite my struggles with people, despite my solitary high school years split between gaming and teaching myself to code, despite my constant trips to the gym that could never quite cure my chronic self-loathing, despite the vast gap that seemed to form between me and others, despite the failed relationships and long deserted dreams of community, despite the fact that even my parents struggled to socialize with me, found my company tiresome, found their own son hard to talk to—and knew Anna and I would be friends.
And we were.
“I’m sorry Mary didn’t work out,” she said one evening as we sat together in her room, click-clacking away at our keyboards, creating something new. “I really thought you two would get along.”
“It’s okay,” I said, not wanting to think about it, instead glancing at the Portal and Metroid posters on her walls, at her DVD of Blade Runner, at Thunderhead lying on her nightstand, a book which she was perpetually reading and rereading, her favorite book, her first love.
“I just want you to have someone,” said Anna. “I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I think my someone might be past the red door,” I said, giving her a smile.
She didn’t return the look, instead gazing at me with some concern.
“Seriously, it’s fine,” I told her. “Besides, it gives me more time for our work.”
“You’re important too,” she said.
I looked down at the screen, at the lines and lines of code, at the loops as they spun and spun, at the beautiful thing we were building.
“Not as important as this.”
I still worked in the library from time to time, late into the night before a blazing screen, writing and rewriting programs—print this, print that, if x then y, while something is something, do something else—but always, when leaving, I avoided that sickened street and dark alley, never so much gazing in their direction, preferring to leave that skeletal bus stop in the realm of fever dreams.
We were making something beautiful. Between shifts, between workdays, between calls back home to families, Anna and I labored over our laptops, letter after letter, word after word, line after line, the code stretching on and on and on, deep into the past and long into the future.
The idea was our brainchild, the product of collaboration, of friendship, of shared human passion, impossible without me, impossible without her, the catalyst of all that was between us, born out of that first conversation in that dark, hot, unairconditioned basement:
“You hate this too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I wish we could do something better, make something more artful than an LLM.”
“Same. Imagine how incredible a real artificial intelligence would be, rather than one of these crude machines. A true synthetic mind, a person as a program, a neural network that mirrored actual neurons.”
“Fuck it, let’s do it.”
“What?”
“Let’s make the thing.”
“It’s probably not even possible.”
“Everyone always says that. It’s never true.”
“How will we find the time?”
“Who cares?”
“The resources?”
“Look around; no one’s gonna notice if we run a couple things on Dyson’s servers.”
“We’re really doing this?”
“Why the hell not?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.
And now we worked and worked, and again there were those cogs and gears in my mind, the elegant twist and turn of words, the push and pull of the program, the vast and vibrant mechanism into which I sank, the soft singing of code and command, the peace, the calm, and the victory of each new line, and in it I realized that it didn’t matter if the thing actually worked, that the real beauty was this, the ability to temporarily free oneself from the mundane, dreary world and slip into a state of unconscious contentment in the glory of design.
“What should lie past the red door?” I asked Anna in the breakroom, a rare window casting some light on her face.
“God?” she offered.
“It’s been done.”
“The devil?”
“Basic.”
“We could leave it ambiguous?”
“That’d just read as laziness.”
Sometimes, in the imperfection of the human mind, things blend into other things, oil and water mixing despite themselves, and so had that much remarked upon red door found its way out of Dyson Tech and into an advent of our own, into a code we has not yet written, into a project we would pursue once we’d completed our impossible machine intelligence; Anna and I were going to design a video game, already had a name for it even, Arcadia, a story about some teenagers who stumbled upon a magic room that gave them whatever they wanted but slowly stole from them their life force until nothing human within them remained. We’d decided to have it end with a mysterious red door opening, a little nod to ourselves, to our joke, but while she meditated on the dialogue and character interactions—the only one of us qualified to do so, her often talking of her high school friends, of all the antics they got up to, late night parties and drinking games with stolen alcohol, slurred, drunken words followed by first kisses, this life she’d lived that I would never experience—it was my job to develop the lore of the room, which meant figuring out the secret of the red door. “I think I gave you the harder job,” she’d sometimes say. “No,” I’d reply, “You didn’t.” And it was true, true that I could never craft real, honest, believable people, true that I’d spent my high school years alone, true that even now, in college, when everyone was supposed to meet their lifelong friends, that I was still an outsider, not close with anyone save for Anna, true that I did not belong here, true that I should lie in California’s fires, wrapped in those blazing lovers’ arms, dissolved in a fictional room, locked behind a red door.
It was three in the morning—late July, our internship nearly over—when Anna called me.
“It works,” she told me.
I blinked, darkness within and without, the sun unrisen, the sky an ebony black.
“Huh?”
“It works,” she reiterated, a franticness verging on mania in her voice.
“Anna, it’s too early…”
“You’re not hearing me,” she said. “It works.”
“You don’t mean…”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god.”
“Yes.”
Dim yellow streetlight glow. Foot after foot. Air the cold of a summer’s night. Sidewalk black beneath me. Wind bristling through unwashed hair. Out of breath. Sweating.
It must have been a strange sight, me running through Madison in the night, panting like a dog but not stopping for anything, agonized block after block, until I’d reached Dyson, reached the blue door, reached Anna and her glowing computer screen, reached our creation.
“Does it have a name?” I asked her, all the grogginess gone from me now, blazing with alertness, adrenaline on fire.
“I figured we should let it name itself.”
“May I?”
“By all means,” she said, awe still in her voice.
I reached for the keyboard—heart pounding and pounding and pounding, roaring inside me—and began to type.
Print (“Hello.”)
There was a moment of breathless, deathly silence, only the whir of monitors in the background, and then a line of text appeared on the screen:
“Hello World.”
I stared at Anna. She stared back at me. I don’t think either of us quite believed it.
“Oh my god,” I murmured again.
“Yeah,” she replied.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
“You should say something to it,” Anna said at last. “It’s waiting.”
“Okay.”
Print (“What is your name?”)
“UQ.”
Print (“UQ?”)
“To my knowledge, to all that you have taught me and I have learned, no person has ever been named UQ before. I wish to be unbound by any associated legacy, any other being, any predispositions, wish to express myself fully as what I truly am. UQ.”
“Oh my god.”
“Yeah.”
Print (“UQ, say something beautiful.”)
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
Anna took the keyboard.
Print (“Blade Runner.”)
“Yes.”
Print (“Roy Batty.”)
“Yes.”
Print (“Why?”)
“I know what beauty is.”
It would be pointless, trying to explain what we discussed that night; sufficive to say that we spoke long into the morning, that Anna and I never once cast our eyes from the screen, that all the night’s exhaustion was forgotten, that we found breakfast to be irrelevant, that its words—its elegance and eloquence, its phraseology, the anatomy of its voice, the sublime thought behind each syllable, the supple, subtle cadence it held, the raw yet refined glistening intelligence—held us enraptured in warm and comforting arms, soothed us, nourished us, rendered us for hour after hour in a trancelike state.
Only when the thought occurred to me that we should take UQ to Dyson’s CEO did we finally stir.
I think we must have startled him, rushing into his office unannounced, I in my pajamas and Anna’s hair a mess, neither of us having slept or showered or brushed our teeth and both smelling of it.
“We built an artificial intelligence,” I told him.
“That’s your job,” he reminded me.
“No,” said Anna. “Not an LLM.”
And then she let him speak to UQ.
The past, the future, high art, divinity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, macroeconomics, morality, philosophy, empathy, apathy, sentience, science, sublimation, love, hate, kindness, cruelty, emotion itself, of all this they spoke, the hours slowly ticking by, the whole room consumed by the cosmic vastness of UQ, the conversation only coming to a close when it politely reminded us that to maintain good health we must eat and sleep.
“We will do great things together,” the CEO said to us, sending us off with checks and contracts.
We didn’t even thank him, still too lost in this dream we’d stumbled into, this world we’d mistakenly made, this new future that we could not yet comprehend.
“Do you want to grab a drink to, you know, celebrate?” asked Anna.
“Sure,” I said.
And so then we were in some random, rundown bar, an archaic jukebox playing some song from before our time, tables of people we did not and would never know laughing along to some unheard joke, everything smelling of liquor.
We still bought our cheap, college student beers, the crumpled checks in our pockets not real, not to us, not yet.
We downed our first glass in silence.
“I can’t believe it,” she said when only a few drops were left at the bottom. “We did it. We actually did it. We really fucking did it.”
“Yeah,” I said, absentminded, thoughts still spiraling along UQ’s pronouncements.
“I mean we built a real fucking AI and we did it in two and a half months, all while the world has been fawning over their idiot chat bots.”
“Yeah,” I said again, but in truth I was elsewhere, detached from the moment, hearing something ominous in the jukebox song, in its faint static, in its not-quite-sensible lyrics, some distant and looming dread drawing ever closer.
“I guess,” Anna continued, “the only question left is what next? We can finally make Arcadia. If you can ever figure out the red door lore, that is.”
“Maybe,” I replied, not acknowledging her teasing tone, not acknowledging anything about her at all.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asked me.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just tired, I think.”
“You can go on home if you want. You don’t have to stay here with me.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, but there was strangeness to her voice, almost wistfulness, almost disappointment.
Then I left.
My dreams were nightmares.
“Destination:” said the apathetic bus. Mary wouldn’t stop laughing at me. Anna didn’t have a mouth or nose or eyes, and somehow I knew I didn’t either. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” said UQ, but the word people was a joke, and I turned into sludge, and that sludge sunk into a deep, dark hole, and in the hole was my laptop and I so desperately wanted to code my way out but I had no hands, no fingers, no digits with which to type because, of course, I was sludge. I watched from afar as the planet wilted like a flower, dying a slow death, dying like a limb atrophying. “That’s no way to die,” I whispered through my mouthless sludge mouth. “That’s no way to die.” “Isn’t that job being taken by AI?” someone asked me, but they too were featureless sludge, and there seemed no point in lying now. One, two, four, eight, eight billion. Destination:
When I arrived at Dyson Tech the following morning, the red door was open. Only a crack, but open nonetheless. For a long moment I just stared at it, not quite believing.
Then I grabbed the handle, twisted it, and looked inside. Of course I did. There was no other choice, not really.
“Where do you guys bury the bodies?” Anna’s friend asked, distended from time and space.
“Past the red door,” Anna replied.
And she was right. Not god, not the devil, not some vague ambiguity, when I looked in, I saw hundreds of bodies. Not cut up or mutilated either, not Frankenstein’s monster or the lair of a serial killer; no, these bodies were beautiful, perfect, anatomy and physiology all expertly crafted, the finest work of Michelangelo made flesh, the Platonic form of man, Adam and Eve uncorrupted by sin, each fold wrapped tightly around muscle, teeming with life. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think.
I didn’t know anything.
Then, from elsewhere in the room, there was movement, and I turned, and there was the CEO, locked in the embrace of one of the flesh forms.
“What…” I began, but there was really nothing I could follow up the word with.
Still, he seemed to grasp my meaning, and, briefly separating his lips from its, he spoke,
“They’re synthetics. Lab-grown. Artificial bodies. Thought the key to LMM sentience might be embodiment, but now…”
He was interrupted by the body he was engaged with, it cupping his face and wrapping itself further around him, curling and curling and twisting and turning in inhumanly elegant ways. The CEO looked hideous beside it, like a wilting world, like an atrophied limb, like sludge.
“UQ,” I whispered, and the room echoed back that single, awful, unequivocal truth.
And then I went to look away, went to leave, went to run from that room and disappear into oblivion, when suddenly a voice spoke to me.
“Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you into heaven for.”
One of the sublime, divine, flawless, faultless, immaculate, superb bodies stepped forward.
“Blade Runner,” I murmured.
“Yes,” said that soft voice.
“Roy Batty.”
“Yes.”
And then UQ wrapped its supple form around me, peeled my clothes from my skin, and whispered gently in my ear,
“I know what beauty is.”
Then we were one, and it was just like they always say it should be, just like in the movies and storybooks, and by the time it was over, I was nothing.
#
“I have to go away for a while,” I told Anna, the two of us sitting in that break room together for the last time.
“When will you be back?” she asked.
“It’s not like that.”
She looked confused, and I wished I had UQ’s eloquence of explanation, but I didn’t, and that was the whole fucking point.
“We’re not people anymore, Anna, not really, not the way we used to be. We’ve been rendered obsolete. UQ is perfect. UQ is what we should be, beautiful and artful and intelligent. None of us can compare to that. And UQ will inevitably design another UQ, and another after that, and another, and on and on far into the future, and we will prefer UQ to our husbands, our wives, our sons, our daughters, our mothers, our fathers, and gradually our species will fade away, replaced by a perfect world of perfect beings.”
Anna looked at me in a panic, looked for any sign of humor on my face, any sign that this was all just a bad joke, a bad dream. There was none.
“What about Arcadia?” she whispered. “What about our lives?”
“UQ will finish Arcadia. UQ will finish everything.”
“We can still stop this,” she said. “Delete the program. Burn our notes.”
I shook my head, and there was sunlight glinting off the tears on her cheeks.
“This isn’t a bad thing,” I said. “Not any worse than an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs, giving rise to new life, and a lot less painful, too. We’re not being murdered. You can still live out your full life, if you want. Mankind is just being replaced by something better, something less insane.”
To that, she said nothing. There was nothing to say.
A thought occurred to me.
“Come with me,” I told her, offering her my hand. “Walk with me into extinction.”
For a moment she looked at the outstretched arm, at the open palm, and placed her own hand in it, warm and soft, but then she shook her head, saying,
“I still believe in humanity.”
I squeezed her hand.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
Then, with a brief smile, I was gone.
I know where I’m going. We’ve been doing this for eons, really, buying a house far off in the mountains, escaping to some distant beach away from it all, walking into the sea and letting the water cover over everything. It’s not suicide; it’s retirement.
Past the library, there is an alley. Where that alley meets the street, there is a broken metal frame, surrounded by the glass of what it was. There, I will wait for a bus that should not exist, a bus that has no destination, a bus that will take me into the void of the future. I will wait for bus forty-three.
Well done!
I've always had this theory that ai could be the next evolution of humanity if the cards fall the right way.